She needed to move.
Ana took two, three deep breaths, clamped down her teeth, and eased herself up.
Blood rushed from her head. She drew a sharp breath as her temple collided with the wall, her hands scrabbling against torn wallpaper for purchase.
The world swayed, then stilled.
She waited for her sight to clear. She’d left her valkryf in the stables; she would need to make her way there. Ramson had gone, and in her current state, she couldn’t search for him. She would need to find a healer of sorts outside town, where she couldn’t be easily recognized.
And then…
Her head spun with the impossibility of it all, the way her plan had completely fractured.
There were still pieces to be picked up.
That started at Goldwater Port.
Ana put one foot before the other. Step by agonizing step she began to walk, pausing every few feet to catch her breath, to anchor herself against the pain thrumming in her midriff.
Somehow, she made it to the front desk. Then to the inn door.
The night was cold, the air bitter with the stench of smoke. Ana stumbled to the stables and was relieved to see her valkryf still there.
She managed to hoist herself onto the saddle, biting back a cry as her wound broke open again.
It took her several tries to ignite her Affinity, and then many more long minutes before she could wrap it over the blood leaking from her wound, hold it in place, and wait for it to coagulate.
With her other hand, she gripped the reins of her valkryf.
The world reeled around her when she emerged from the stables, slumping forward in the saddle, her head pounding, her blood dripping down the length of her hand and dotting the snow. Fighting, with her every last breath, to live.
Linn counted down the seconds on the second day from her conversation with the yaeger. She sat, stone-still as her masters had taught her to, and thought of time passing as the slow drip, drip, drip of water wearing through rock. It was the Kemeiran way, of balance and harmony and staying attuned to the elements around you, aligning the ones inside you.
Drip, drip, drip.
For with patience, even water would carve through rock.
It was difficult, though, to think of water now when she’d barely had any in almost three days. Her mouth was excruciatingly dry, her tongue sandpaper against her throat, and she found herself thinking of the flat, wide rivers that cleaved the jagged mountains of Kemeira, how the waters turned the color of mandarins during sunsets, splashing against her skin in golden drops, cold and sweet against her tongue.
Someday—perhaps even someday soon—she’d see it all again.
With difficulty, she wrangled her thoughts back to the present. It had been two days since she’d had any food, and the minimal amounts of water she’d had were just to keep her from exhibiting any further symptoms of dehydration. Slowly, second by painful second, the Deys’voshk she had been consuming from her food was being weaned from her bloodstream. And it was working.
Her Affinity was returning.
Even as she sat against the wall, slightly dizzy and lips chapped from thirst, she felt it: the stir of her powers, attuned to the movement of wind between the cracks of the rough-hewn stone walls, the slightest whorls in the air with every breath in and out.
She was ready. Any moment now, her plan would be set in motion.
She heard it then, the faraway clack of footsteps that sent hollow echoes through the corridors and vibrations up the stone walls, dragging her from her stupor. In seconds, the small rectangular chute would open and her tray of food would tumble to the floor. They meant for her to slurp the kashya from the ground like a dog.
Except she wouldn’t. And she never would again.
The approaching footsteps belonged to Isyas: that slightly uneven, sloppy edge to each step that was so different from Vasyl’s cruel, calculated clicks.
When the food flap opened, she was ready.
Linn sprang from her position like a viper. Her arm shot through the chute, her fingers clattering past the tray of food and latching on to Isyas’s wrist. She yanked him against her cell door, and before he could let out a sound, her other arm was through, hand clapping against his mouth.
Linn needed only one hand to kill a man.
She twisted.
Isyas’s body went limp. Linn heard the jangle of his keys cut short as they scraped against her cell door, tucked awkwardly in that position at his hips. Leaning against the cold blackstone door, she tugged him against the opening at the chute, fingers creeping along his uniform until she found the cold metal and sharp-cut edges of the keys.
With a few deft twists of her fingers, the keys were in her palm, and she couldn’t still her trembling as she fit them into the keyhole.
The door swung open with a cringingly slow creak.
She hauled Isyas’s body into her cell, swiping two daggers from his uniform and strapping them to her wrists. She had to throw her entire body weight against the door to press it shut. It closed with a grating sound that echoed throughout the corridors.
It took all of her willpower to shove the upturned tray and bread through the chute and to ignore the watery kashya porridge already seeping into the cracks on the floor. It should have turned her stomach, but she swallowed against the urge to drop to her knees and lap it all up.
Her head spun as she started down the dimly lit dungeon corridor, dehydration sending nausea pulsing through her stomach. The daggers were heavy in her hands, and once or twice, she leaned against the wall, certain she was going to pass out.
It had felt all right sitting there in the darkness, yet standing outside, she realized how weak she really was. She’d overestimated herself.
As another bout of dizziness crashed into her, one thing kept her grounded. A pair of fire-ice eyes. A deep, steady voice.
I will come for you, at the midnight shift.
No, she had to be far from this place by then. She’d planned this precisely so that she would escape during her mealtime, hours before the midnight shift. Hours before that yaeger would come for her. She didn’t trust him, and there was even less of a chance that she would lead him to Ana.
She was breathing hard as she navigated the corridors, tracing the familiar paths she had taken twice each day to the stairs. The shadows around her seemed to shift, and once or twice, she thought she caught movement at the corners of her vision that turned out to be nothing.
A small draft stirred her Affinity. She latched on to that. She was close, so close.
Linn slowed before the last turn. Taking care not to make noise, she pressed herself against the wall. Two guards always stood sentry before the spiraling staircases; she caught the tremors in the air from their breaths, pulsing warnings against her senses.
She’d have to fight them to get past them.
Gods, she thought, drawing deep, silent breaths, as though that would replenish her strength. She palmed the daggers she had stolen from Isyas. Her hands shook as she lifted the blades before her face in a silent prayer.
Footsteps clattered in the corridor beyond. Before she’d had a chance to react, the dungeon doors burst open, and Vasyl’s snarl echoed in the corridors. “…don’t care that that Nandjian bastard’s ordered us to lay off. I’m the Deputy Warden, and I’ll get a confession out of that Kemeiran if it’s the las—”
Linn sprang the moment Vasyl and his guards rounded the corner. Her daggers cut two wicked red lines across their throats. Their bodies thumped as they fell to the floor, blood gushing down the gray of their armor.
Vasyl was backing away and screaming at the remaining two guards at the entrance to get her, get her.
Linn’s head pounded; her hands shook as she refocused her blurring sight on the two guards charging her.
The Wind Master
s had taught her that the most successful warriors borrowed from each of the elements, their bodies attuned to whichever suited the moment best. Fire. Water. Air. Earth. Always adapting, always fluid.
In that moment, Linn became water.
She slid beneath the outstretched sword of the first guard, curving around the twist of his body like water around a rock. And then she was fire: her arm shot out, dagger plunging into his back. Crimson splattered her as she slashed.
A sharp pain pierced her side. Linn clamped down on the urge to scream as her senses blanched into a mass of white-hot pain.
She stumbled.
Her knees gave out.
“I’ve got her!” the fourth and final guard crowed, like a child who had ensnared a small animal by accident. “Lieutenant!”
Boots clacked against the cold stone floor, and Vasyl slammed his knee into her stomach.
Linn coughed blood. The dungeon ceilings swam in and out of focus, and under the flickering torchlight, Vasyl’s face cracked in a terrifying smile. “Some things just don’t change, Kemeiran,” he whispered, his breath cold and rotten against her face. “You slit-eyed deimhovs aren’t meant for this world, and I would gladly enforce that for you.”
Linn screamed when he twisted the knife in her. It scraped against bone. She fought against the darkness blotting her vision.
Was this how it all ended? Memories, images, or dreams—she could no longer tell—flashed before her eyes, of Kemeira, her home, a past she’d forsaken and a future she’d lost. Kemeira, an endless maze of mountains and mist, set afire by the blazing sunrises that she longed to chase to the ends of the world. Kemeira, haunted by the brightness in her brother’s eyes, a scattering of stars against a midnight sky, as he took after her on makeshift wings he’d been born to fly. A brightness that had disappeared the day the traffickers took him, a streak of a comet against the night, too quickly gone.
No, she thought, and a sob choked her throat. No, she wasn’t ready.
Through the darkness that threatened to drag her down and the pain that numbed her mind, she found a sliver of wind, whispering at the back of her mind. Her companion, her shield, her sword.
Linn latched on to it. And pulled.
Her Affinity roared to life. Vasyl’s weight lifted from her and she heard him shriek as he slammed into the opposite wall. The gale howled; the torches in the dungeon went dark.
Somehow, Linn dragged herself to her feet.
Somehow, she picked up the discarded dagger by the dead guard’s side. Limped toward Vasyl, the winds screaming at her back, the knife in her midriff slicing with every shift of her body.
“We slit-eyed deimhovs have our rights to this world every bit as much as you do,” she managed, and the words, instead of becoming lost, seemed magnified by the wind, echoing down the lightless corridor. “And I will show you what I can do.”
She brought her dagger to his chest and pushed.
The hatred, the animosity, and the terror faded in Vasyl’s eyes. Within moments, Linn was staring into the blank gaze of a corpse.
She crumpled a second after he did. Her winds had gone; the corridor was eerily silent. The torches were out. Her prison garb was sticky, she realized, from a mix of her and Vasyl’s blood. Lying there, alone in the darkness, slowly bleeding out, she held a hand before her.
Was this it? Had she endured and survived years beneath the hands of her traffickers and exploiters, only to die without anyone even knowing? She thought of her mother, who would never know what had happened to her that day she went to the ocean and never returned.
Her thoughts blurred; she was slipping. Her brother’s face came to her first, radiating joy, forever frozen in childhood. A memory…a dream, of him alighting at the edges of the cliff, his footsteps echoing as he approached her, laughing. No fair, ane-ka, you cheated!
Enn, she tried to say, but her arms were heavy as she reached for him, and the shadows were closing in.
His face morphed then, eyes gleaming strangely silver in the darkness, his skin a deeper hue as he drew closer. The world rocked gently. She fought for consciousness, her limbs dragging against her urge to move, move, move, or she would be—
“Calm down,” a deep voice said, “unless you want to die.”
It grew lighter. Warmer. The face swam in and out of focus, and her wearied brain struggled to make sense of it. She was on a flat surface, the world anchored around her.
Something cold touched her lips, trickling down her tongue and sloshing over her chin.
Water.
She drank greedily, half-aware that she clung to a rough hand that held the waterskin before her. She drank until she paused to gasp for air.
Her head still pounded, and her body ached as her consciousness rose to clarity. The first thing she noticed was the draft, subtle but cold and pine-scented. It slipped through the cracks in the window to her left, carrying over the oakwood desk where she lay, and stirring the flames of the candle.
Window, she thought, and everything came rushing back.
“No,” Linn gasped, sitting up—which was a terrible mistake. Her head threatened to split into two, and a sharp pain sliced through her abdomen.
“For one so stubbornly alive, you seem quite intent on dying.”
Her head whirled. “You,” she choked out.
The yaeger watched her, leaning against the marble wall of his study, arms crossed. The flickering candlelight sketched the sharp ridges of his outline, the cords of muscle that showed even through his uniform. His eyes were narrowed, his head tilted just slightly, as though she were a particularly difficult puzzle he was trying to figure out. “Please relax. You were unconscious for nearly twenty-five minutes, and I’ve given you all the healing draft I have. I’d rather not have you pass out on me again.”
Linn suddenly realized the ache in her head was fading. Even the pain in her side dulled as she sat still, watching him watching her. Her wound was cleaned and bandaged, and an oversized cloak was draped over her.
Her hands sat on her lap, disturbingly empty. Her knives. Where were her knives?
“In case you’re looking for these.” A sweep of his fingers, and Linn’s daggers—the ones she’d stolen from Isyas—appeared in the yaeger’s hands.
Linn tilted her head down slightly, watching him approach, her body coiled like a spring. Injured and barely revived, she couldn’t do much against him even if she wanted.
The boots stopped clicking. The yaeger was an arm’s length from her, dagger held lazily in his hand. A dull red wound marked his palm. She thought of the way his hands had touched her cheeks, her shoulders, her clothes, his blood—which had passed for hers—slick against her skin.
“I told you I would come for you, and we’d leave this place together.” His voice was deep, cold, with an undercurrent of command. “You would rather risk death than trust me?”
“Death, thirst, and starvation,” Linn corrected, but her voice was small and shaky.
“I told you, I am not your enemy.”
She was silent, the cogs in her brain working faster now. He’d told her he wanted to join ranks with Ana, but she didn’t trust him.
She couldn’t escape him, either. Not now, when she’d lost all her strength. “You wish to defect,” she said, stalling for the moment. “You would throw away everything—your rank, your honor, your badges—to join a rebel group?”
He didn’t move, but there was the slightest shift in his eyes, like a cloud passing overhead. He turned away, brows creasing. “I told you. I cannot stand under the leadership of this empire, watching innocents—children—die.”
A memory rose, unbidden: men seizing her from her bed aboard the trader’s ship, rough fingers on her shoulders and back hauling her out, piercing sunlight, and then a view of a cold, frozen land. Soldiers at the docks, in uniforms of pure white, silver
insignias flashing at their chests.
She’d recognized the silver-tiger emblems of the Cyrilian Empire.
Help, she’d screamed in the Kemeiran tongue. Please, help!
They had looked at her, and they had laughed.
Linn said nothing.
The yaeger watched her a moment more, then crossed the room. He fumbled in some drawers, and moments later plonked a set of folded clothes and leather boots beside her. “Get dressed. We move soon.”
Move? He was asking her to move already, when it hadn’t even been an hour since she’d been stabbed? Linn frowned at him, then gathered what was left of her dignity and straightened. “What is your plan?”
He drew a set of keys from his belt and unlocked the window at the corner of the study. The metal-latticed shutters banged against the walls. A cold wind swept in, scattering papers on the oakwood desk and stirring Linn’s thin linen shirt.
The candle extinguished, plunging them into darkness.
By the windowsill and draped in night, the yaeger looked as though he had been cast in liquid silver and shadows. “My plan,” he said, “is to throw us out this window, seeing as you’re so good at jumping from tall places.”
It took her a few moments to realize he wasn’t joking. Linn gaped. “You are an Imperial Patrol,” she emphasized. “Surely you have other methods of escape?” She waved a palm. “The front gates, perhaps?”
“I am as much a prisoner here as you are,” he replied. “The Empress and my kapitan sent me here in lieu of exile. Disobeying the Empress’s direct orders is punishable by death. I’m worse off than I would be should I defect.” His head snapped up, and his gaze sharpened. “That’s why I’m here with you.”
Linn watched him carefully. She didn’t trust him nearly enough to lead him to Ana, but she did need him to escape this wretched prison.
It helped that he was exceptionally skilled at fighting. And that he might have some knowledge of Morganya’s troop movements and plans.
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